§ 9
The idea that the guardianship of Peter was just a little duty to be seen to, vanished at the sight of him in favour of the realization of a living relationship. There are moments when small boys of ten in perfect health and condition can look the smallest, flimsiest, and most pathetic of created things—and at the same time preternaturally valiant and intelligent. They take on a likeness to sacred flames that may at any moment flicker out. More particularly does this unconscious camouflage of delicacy occur in the presence of parents and guardians already in a state of self-reproach and emotional disorder. Mr. Grimes with an eye to growth had procured a grey flannel suit a little too large for Peter, but it never occurred to Oswald that the misfit could be due to anything but a swift and ominous shrinkage of the boy. He wanted to carry him off forthwith to beer and cream and sea-bathing.
But these were feelings he knew he must not betray.
“I must tell you some more stories,” he said. “I’ve come back to England to live.”
“Here?”—brightly.
“Well, near here. But I shall see a lot of you now, Peter.”
“I’ll like that,” said Peter. “I’ve often thought of you....”
A pause.
“You broken your arm?” said Peter.
“Not so bad as that. I’ve got to have some bits of shell taken out.”
“That Egyptian shell? When you got the V.C.?”
“I never told you of the Egyptian shell?” asked Oswald.
“Mummy did. Once. Long ago.”
Another pause.
“This garden’s not so greatly altered, Peter,” said Oswald.
“There’s a Friendship’s Garden up that end,” said Peter, indicating the end by a movement of his head. “But it isn’t much. Aunt Phœbe started it and forgot it. Every one who came was to plant something. And me and Joan have gardens, but they’ve got all weedy now.”
“Let’s have a look at it all,” said Oswald, and guardian and ward strolled towards the steep.
“The Dahlias are splendid this year,” Oswald remarked, “and these Japanese roses are covered with berries. Splendid, aren’t they? One can make a jelly of them. Quite a good jelly. And let me see, wasn’t there a little summerhouse at the end of this path where one looked over the Weald? Ah! here it is. Hardly changed at all.”
He sat down. Here he had talked with Dolly and taken her hand....
He bestirred himself to talk.
“And exactly how old are you now, Peter?”
“Ten years and two months,” said Peter.
“We’ll have to find a school for you.”
“Have you been in Africa since I saw you?” Peter asked, avoiding the topic.
“Since you saw me going off,” said Oswald, and the man glanced at the boy and the boy glanced at the man, and each was wondering what the other remembered. “I’ve been in Uganda all the time. There’s been fighting and working. Some day you must go to Uganda and see all that has been done. We’ve made a good railway and good roads and telegraphs. We’ve put down robbers and cruelty.”
“And shot a lot of lions?”
“Plenty. The lions were pretty awful for a bit. About Nairobi and along the line.”
“Shot ’em when they were coming at you?”
“One was coming straight at me.”
“That’s my skin,” said Peter.
Oswald made no answer.
“I’d like to go to Africa,” said Peter.
“You shall.”
He decided to begin at once upon his neglected task of making an Imperial citizen according to the ideas that prevailed before the advent of the New Imperialism. “That sort of thing,” he said, “is what we Englishmen are for, you know, Peter. What our sort of Englishman is for anyhow. We have to go about the world and make roads and keep the peace and see fair play. We’ve got to kill big beasts and climb hard mountains. That’s the job of the Englishman. He’s a sort of policeman. A sort of working guardian. Not a nosy slave-driver trying to get rich. He chases off slave-drivers. All the world’s his beat. India, Africa, China, and the East, all the seas of the world. This little fat green country, all trim and tidy and set with houses and gardens, isn’t much of a land for a man, you know—unless he’s an invalid. It’s a good land to grow up in and come back to die in. Or rest in. But in between, no!”
“No,” said Peter.
“No.”
“But you haven’t come back to die, Uncle Nobby?”
“No fear. But I’ve had to come back. I’m resting. This old arm, you know, and all that sort of thing. Just for a time.... And besides I want to see a lot of you.”
“Yes.”
“You have to grow up here and learn all you can, science and all sorts of things, so that you can be a useful man—wherever you have to go.”
“Africa,” said Peter.
“Africa, perhaps. And that’s why one has to go to school and college—and learn all about it.”
“They haven’t taught me much about it yet,” said Peter.
“Well, you haven’t been to much in the way of schools,” said Oswald.
“Are there better schools?”
“No end. We’re going to find one,” said Oswald.
“I wish school was over,” said Peter.
“Why? You’ve got no end to learn yet.”
“I want to begin,” said Peter, looking out across the tumbled gentleness of the Weald.
“Begin school?”
“No, begin—Africa, India—doing things.”
“School first,” said Oswald.
“Are there schools where you learn about guns and animals and mountains and foreign people?” said Peter.
“There must be,” said Oswald. “We’ll find something.”
“Where you don’t do Latin and parsing and ’straction of the square root.”
“Oh! those things have their place.”
“Did you have to do them, Uncle Nobby?”
“Rather.”
“Were they useful to you?”
“At times—in a way. Of course those things are good as training, you know—awfully good. Harden up the mental muscles, Peter.”
Peter made no reply to that.
Presently Peter said, “Shall I learn about machines?”
“When you’ve done some mathematics, Peter.”
“I’d like to fly,” said Peter.
“That’s far away yet.”
“There was a boy at that school, his father was an engineer; and he said that flying machines were coming quite soon.”
This was beyond Oswald’s range.
“The French have got a balloon that steers about,” he said. “That’s as near as we are likely to come to flying for a long time yet.”
“This boy said that he meant a real flying machine, not a balloon. It was to be heavier than air. It would fly like a kite or a bird.”
“I doubt if we’ll see that in my lifetime,” said Oswald; “or yours,” blind to the fate that had marked Peter for its own.
“H’m,” said Peter, with a shadow falling upon one of his brightest dreams. (Nobby ought to know these things. His word ought surely to be final. Still, after all, this chap’s father was an engineer.) “I’d love to fly,” said Peter.